The Government appears ready to claim that the ‘imminent’ threat of climate change justifies what will be the largest taxpayer investment ever recorded in wind and solar farms in British history. The Telegraph has the details.
Sir Keir Starmer is to unveil the first investment by the £8.3 billion taxpayer-funded Great British Energy, which will back renewable energy projects to help meet the Government’s Net Zero goals.
The Prime Minister will say the Government is “rolling up our sleeves to deliver for Britain” as he announces a partnership with the Crown Estate to help develop the seabed for offshore wind power.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, said the £8.3 billion investment in GB Energy was vital to meet the “huge challenges” the country faced, including the climate crisis, which was “not a future threat but a present reality”.
“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown clean energy,” he said.
“That is why making Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030 is one of the Prime Minister’s five missions, with the biggest investment in home-grown clean energy in British history.”
A Great British Energy Bill will be introduced in Parliament on Thursday to formally establish the company, which will have its headquarters in Scotland.
The company is expected to take a stake in renewables energy projects alongside the private sector. …
In its first major project, GB Energy will provide spatial planning, surveying and grid design assistance to the Crown Estate to help speed up the development of offshore wind projects. …
It is not yet clear how much of the £8.3 billion will be divided between projects such as the Crown Estate deal and other types of investment. …
Josh Buckland, a former civil servant in the energy department and senior fellow at Policy Exchange, said there was a lack of clarity about how GB Energy will operate.
“This includes how any public ownership will be designed in such a way not to distort the market for private investment,” he said.
“Until that is understood, it’s hard to assess how much value GB Energy will deliver in practice to the taxpayer or billpayer.”
Worth reading in full.
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It may be obvious, but it’s a good source of revenue for the Crown, which owns the sea and rents out the land used by the turbines. No doubt the King is in favour of it.
He won’t get any more from it than the normal grant. Mind he is a bit dim and believes all this envirocrap because he is surrounded by sycophants.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britains-crown-estate-post-record-profits-offshore-wind-licenses-2024-07-24/ Although the sovereign grant %age has been reduced according to this article, the gross amount will go up with more turbines being installed.
Worth noting too is that it is the Treasury that benefits most from the licence revenue.
“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown clean energy,” Not the only way. North Sea oil and gas is plentiful and cheaper. Oh, but I forget. This has been the hottest year in the UK since time immemorial (says I reaching for my jumper in July).
Some bollox on the radio news last night saying the last 24 hours had been the hottest ever on earth… argh
I wonder what the “global temperature” (whatever that is supposed to mean) was the day before someone invented the thermometer.
The oligarchs in our society who are the ones that basically govern us and call the shots no longer have their grip on the oil and gas markets like they used to. (For clarity, Starmer, Sunak and whoever’s turn it is are the people they use to oversee us and convince us to do as they say.)
Energy produced from “renewables” on the other hand they do control.
We are the market they want to control and make sure they collect all the revenue from.
So they demonise oil and gas on the premise that it produces CO2 – which the gullible, ignorant masses have been convinced is a pollutant – so that they can sell to us an inferior, more expensive product which they own and control.
That’s the play. That’s always been the play.
We are the carbon the Davos Deviants intend to reduce.
On the money. I’ve noted down yr excellent post for future use in discussions.
“Until that is understood, it’s hard to assess how much value GB Energy will deliver in practice to the taxpayer or billpayer.”
It is easy to understand. High energy bills, countryside littered with solar panels and windmills and a laughing Chinese as they take all our wealth.
They cannot use climate change to justify this splurge of our money on unreliable renewables because even if all of the modelling masquerading as science turns out to be accurate, which it hasn’t so far, the contribution the UK makes to any changes in global climate is miniscule. Even Tony Blair admitted recently that anything the UK does regarding emissions reduction will have no effect on global climate.
——So climate change sounds like a plausible excuse to ordinary people who know little about the issue and it sounds plausible to people that we should rely on Renewables because it would appear they can “save the planet”, but in reality this is simply not the case, and the claim we will have “cheaper energy” bills is a bare faced lie. The countries with the highest electricity prices are all the ones with the most wind turbines—-Germany Denmark and the UK.
“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from IMPORTED fossil fuels and UNRELIABLE EXPENSIVE RENEWABLES, towards home-BASED OIL AND GAS RESERVES AND FRACKING,” he said.
There, that’s fixed it for him
And home based coal. We still have reserves?
In the 1970’s our coal reserves were estimated to be 400 years worth and that was based on consumption at that time. Consumption has reduced significantly since.
Additionally the term ‘reserves’ is used to refer to absolute and known stocks and in reality tends to be perhaps only based on 50 % of actual / potential reserves.
Coal is now the enemy in silly countries like the UK and is virtually gone, but in China and India and other developing countries it is the fuel that is bringing millions of poor people out a life of abject misery and is their saviour.
—–Politics is a nasty old business and energy politics is particularly nasty, and as Joni Michell pointed out “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone”.
Our coal reserves are still with us varmint.
Let’s not forget that coal is the cheapest way to produce energy, and it is the therefore the most powerful driver of Industrial capitalism. The Climate Change scam is anti capitalist, and does not want the economic growth that it brings, because along with the prosperity cheap energy brings, it also brings FREEDOM, and freedom brings private property, private vehicles, and less reliance on Socialist Governments who think it is government who should be in control of all land, property, and how we all live.
Exactly and ‘no science required.’
Across the pond there are the magnificent seven (at least) Will Happer, William van Wijngaarden, Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Fred Singer, Willy Sun, John Clauser. These extremely distinguished scientists all publicly stand up for rigorous science, and call out the utter corruption of the climate change narrative.
Is there not one UK scientist who will put their head above the parapet to do the same here, before the alarmists bankrupt the country?
Dr Mike Yeadon is a scientist although his field is pharmacology but he is strongly rebutting the climate scam.
https://truth613.substack.com/p/the-rockefellers-created-990-climate?triedRedirect=true
You do not need UK scientists to dismantle the climate narrative. Just as you didn’t need a UK scientists to confirm general relativity. Science is true or it isn’t true everywhere.
True, but you need credible people to be continually refuting the narrative. Happer recently toured Australia doing just that
There are plenty of people available to refute the narrative. It isn’t more people to refute it that is required, it is more TV and Radio Channels prepared to not be bought and paid for by the Climate Industrial Complex.
Well, who are these scientists? Your point about the MSM omertà is of course taken. On that front I think there is a glimmer of hope. Reform’s manifesto specifically rejects current alarmism. I know they have only 5 MPs, but they have a voice, and Farage is box office, to some extent at least.
You are asking me “Who are these scientists”? ——Maybe you have not been looking into this issue for very long. You mentioned Happer and if you are interested enough you can check the work of Roy Spencer, Judith Christie, Richard Lindzen, Ross McKitrick, Christopher Essex, John Christie, Craig Idso, Willie Soon, Fred Singer, David legates, etc etc. You can also check the work of energy experts like Robert Bryce, Michael J Economides and Peter Glover, Vaclav Smil and the work of Bjorn Lomborg (Economist) and Michael Schellenberger. There are also many commentators and scrutinizers of Net Zero such as Ross Clark, Andrew Montford. ——There are also many fantastic books eg “Hubris” Michael Hart. “Watermelons” James Dellingpole, “Fossil Future” Alex Epstein, “Climate Cult” Brian Sussman, “Climate Alarmism” John G Dawson, etc etc……..I hope you might find this useful.
Paul Burgess. Currently trying, at his own expense, to help the hapless, ignorant Manx government (Isle of Man, UK) who think they can go entirely renewable within a few years.
An interesting plan is pumped storage: to feed water down into caverns and boreholes and, er, pump it back up again! Seriously. This is a proposal made for storage and shows the utter lack of intelligence.
Are any of the scientists mentioned working in the Uk or are UK citizens? You surely don’t think Ross Clark and other commentators you cite are scientists?
Yes, 4 million voters who think the climate crisis is hogwash and a scam. Reform needs to build momentum on this net zero nonsense.
the Government is “rolling up our sleeves to deliver for Britain”
It’s rolling up its sleeves to better reach the few remaining pennies at the bottom of the tax-payer’s pocket.
So the State can piss away even more of it.
Wind and solar was sod all use yesterday morning (cyan and yellow on chart) – let’s hope some amazing new storage solution is coming along with this eh… see the nuclear line at the bottom – rock steady base load, we should have 3-4 times as much…
I check GridWatch.co.uk a few times a day. It’s fascinating to see the utter futility of NetZero.
Storage is all very well but when you have wind or sunshine again it needs filling up so taking a lot of energy that you’d like to be using at the same time.
Yes this excellent data freely available is enough for anyone to see the craziness you’d like to think! If we had 100 pumped storage sites in the UK we’d be laughing, however sadly we don’t, and there is no other viable bulk storage solution as yet, so gas as a reasonably fast response is only option. Still wasteful as the plant has to be kept spinning etc so it can ramp up in a shortish time
Slightly off topic. What I can’t figure out is that in WW2 we were busy fighting and burning an enormous amount of diesel and petrol and blowing each other up etc- why didn’t the co2 levels go crazy then? And then we locked down in 2000/2021- no effect on C02. Perhaps I am not understanding something?
Numbers: 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere. c.97% naturally made.
So man made CO2 3% of 0.04%=0.0012%. Not very impactful even if you double or quadruple it.
On the point of energy security: This is something we had in the Western world, whose wealth has always been a result of the abundant use of fossil fuels, until the advent of so-called renewable energy infrastructure. What the “renewables” industry has done, on the contrary, is to take a massive gamble with energy security and possibly will end up having no choice but to revert back to domestic production of oil and gas (and actually doing the sensible thing and tapping into the abundant oil of the North Sea), once practical reality kicks in.
Government investment = urinal.
Effectively another form of subsidy, just not directly called that
“Until that is understood, it’s hard to assess how much value GB Energy will deliver in practice to the taxpayer or billpayer”.
In practice, none!